The replacement is up, and it is not in the same place.
It is a deeper drum than the old one, ringed with three stepped louvres and crossed by four small vanes, moulded in a plastic so smooth and so unsooted that it reads as almost white against a ceiling that has been coming apart for decades. It is the only clean object in ten paintings. The light strikes its lower rim and slides right off it, and I had to invent a way of painting that.
And it is mounted up and to the right of the old disc, by roughly a third of its own width.
You can see all of it. The pale circle is still there, lit, complete, and the new housing covers only its upper right sector. The old left screw hole is out in the open, a dark eye in the plaster with nothing in it. Two new holes have gone in somewhere under the new plate. Nobody filled the old ones and nobody painted anything.
The offset is the whole picture and I want to be honest about not being able to explain it. The centre of that disc was where the brass hook went in. Either the hook was pulled and the installer avoided a torn screw seat, or the hook is still in there and the new unit was set beside it because it could not be set over it. I cannot tell from below, and I did not go up the ladder a fourth time, and I have decided that not knowing is more accurate than picking one.
What is certain is that the new device could not have the old position. The place on that ceiling that a hundred years of paint had certified, the one spot the room had a record for, was already occupied by somebody’s short-lived intention to hang up a plant. So the safety of that room has been moved eight centimetres sideways, which changes nothing about how it works, and is the only trace anyone will ever have that a person passed through with a screwdriver in between.
The web has not been touched. It is exactly where it was in the last three paintings, off the lower left of the old circle, still anchored to a ceiling. The installer worked within a hand’s width of it and left it alone.
And there is no light on the new one. I painted the whole face and left the diode window for last in case it came on, and it did not come on that night, and the photographs from the following week do not show it either. It may be waiting for someone to press it once.
Ten paintings, and the object has never once told anybody about a fire. It asked for a battery for months in a voice built for catastrophe, and then it stopped, and then it was taken down, and now there is a new one on the ceiling, correctly installed, silent, unlit, slightly to the right of where the room believes it should be.